I posted in the "which reader" thread (Sony T1 vs Kobo or other epub reader) and had some good suggestions, but it kind of got sidetracked into "how and where to buy books and to consider that in purchasing your reader as an American expatriot" (we won't go there). I hope here to find the answers I need.

I followed a great post another user placed here and in Kobo--and their answers were very helpful. I am tending towards a Sony. Two questions have not been answered and would seal the deal for me.

As I teach languages at the college level, my idea in having a reader includes not only the ability to read for pleasure but also to carry my books (mostly public domain) and "work on the road".

For this, I would ideally be able to underline/highlight and take notes which could then be exported to my pc. Is this possible? I know I can take in book notes, etc. but can they be exported for further use? It would completely smooth my workflow--when I read with regular books, typing them, etc takes so much more time! I see this as the BEST reason for me to go electronic.

I have heard that the Sony software is less than ideal and use calibre on my pc already. I read that using the software forces a "sync" that would drive me nuts! Is this true and would it be necessary to use the Sony software to sync notes?

Does anyone use this function who can give me information? Or is someone willing to "try it out" for me?

Important:

how large a highlighted area? character based? unlimited within reason (I'm not talking whole pages here)

can you highlight "across the page" in one step?

can you export them per drag & drop or only with the Sony software or not at all?

is there another method that makes it more effecient? (just to give another possibility for those who have figured a work-around)

I'm still somewhat new at the T1, so I would love to hear of a way I don't know but I've found no way to backup handwritten notes except with the Sony reader software.

Yes, it does run automatically when I connect to my laptop but I immediately close it unless I specifically want to back up the notes because I've stripped DRM and don't want them overwritten.

I don't add many handwritten notes to books, but I'm now testing this and will post later with results from calibre.

Edit: I wanted to be sure, but I've found no way to backup the notes in calibre. I added a note to a public domain epub, saved and synched with calibre but the note was not visible when I viewed the document on my laptop.

Handwritten notes are basically a set of coordinates of points. It's surely not impossible to export this to an open format such as svg, but the complexity exceeds the interest by far. You should use text selection and type your notes with the virtual keyboard or cope with Sony software.

sorry. perhaps I wasn't clear enough. There is a difference between writing on the page or writing a note. I was clearly referring to the annotation feature of the sony.

I wasn't meaning a handwritten note, but a note typed into the t1 using the keyboard. when you highlight, it is possible to annotate the passage (either graphically or with the keyboard) and it was these notes i was referring to--if you type them, you should be able to export them, right? If not, it is rather a useless function, right?

And what about highlighted areas? Can they be exported? I know some readers can do this--so it doesn't seem that either of these options should be considered useless or of little value or complicated. Some readers allow excerpt-exporting to fb which is of no interest to me but proves that there is a market somewhere and it is possible. (Please do not recommend that I just go with those--I am looking here for the capabilities of the Sony, not another reader.)

And (just because of the statement previously) touch screens have offered exporting of "doodles" for years. I know that there are people who use it. So that is also "of value" and must be viable. But that was not my question--don't want an etch-a-sketch.

Again: Can you export highlighted areas (text) and annotations to your pc. If so, how?

sorry, I just caught that yes, you can export your annotations via Sonys software (not the separate notes function, right? That is great news. How does this work with the books on the reader (the syncing problem)?

Is it logical or is there a work-around using another program? Can the notes be exported from the book? Or is the book just "backed up" including the notes? Ideally I would have a list of exported notes and/or quotes that I could access from my pc as needed to import into i.e. book reviews.

Thanks again. Tried the Sony today and it was great--just this feature was a bit more than what could be worked with in a shop.

When you sync a book with the Sony Reader program on your PC(or Mac?), you can then press a little button in the right hand corner of the screen that exports all notes and highlighted portions to an RTF file (readable with Word or other word processors).

The big sticking point is that it seems that only the first 100 characters of highlighted portions of text can be exported.* This makes the PRS T1 a bit of a dodgy proposition for any sustained academic reading in my book, although I have liked some of its other features. There may be hope with the work that people are doing to get the T1 to play well with Calibre, but I'm new to this whole business and with luck someone else will be able to shed better light on things.

*This is apparently an artificial restriction introduced to prevent wholesale copying of books, which strikes me as fairly absurd.

I hope my query is on topic enough to continue this thread: Has anyone else found that the PRS-T1 ends up duplicating typed notes and bookmarks multiple times? I'm wondering whether this is a bug with the Sony Reader software or something I'm doing wrong.

Well this thread has provided a way for me to export my highlights which is good. The fact that it's via Reader and I can't find away to get Reader to sync any books that have been put onto the device via Calibre rather than Reader is not so useful.

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Originally Posted by col_pogo

The big sticking point is that it seems that only the first 100 characters of highlighted portions of text can be exported.

I had a quick look at the database on my PRS-T1 in the hopes that the highlights were stored in full in there (would have been very easy to write something to extract them from the DB). Unfortunately they are not, only the truncated text is stored. However the start and the end of the highlight appear to be stored. Someone that knows about the ePub format should be able to write a calibre plugin to get the full highlighted portions out. I'm not familiar with python, calibre's plugin system or ePub and unfortunately I don't have time to get into it at the moment, but it definitely looks possible so their is hope. (For non-drm'd books anyway, not sure about ones with drm)

Well this thread has provided a way for me to export my highlights which is good. The fact that it's via Reader and I can't find away to get Reader to sync any books that have been put onto the device via Calibre rather than Reader is not so useful.

I had a quick look at the database on my PRS-T1 in the hopes that the highlights were stored in full in there (would have been very easy to write something to extract them from the DB). Unfortunately they are not, only the truncated text is stored. However the start and the end of the highlight appear to be stored. Someone that knows about the ePub format should be able to write a calibre plugin to get the full highlighted portions out. I'm not familiar with python, calibre's plugin system or ePub and unfortunately I don't have time to get into it at the moment, but it definitely looks possible so their is hope. (For non-drm'd books anyway, not sure about ones with drm)

I had a quick look at the database on my PRS-T1 in the hopes that the highlights were stored in full in there (would have been very easy to write something to extract them from the DB). Unfortunately they are not, only the truncated text is stored. However the start and the end of the highlight appear to be stored. Someone that knows about the ePub format should be able to write a calibre plugin to get the full highlighted portions out. I'm not familiar with python, calibre's plugin system or ePub and unfortunately I don't have time to get into it at the moment, but it definitely looks possible so their is hope. (For non-drm'd books anyway, not sure about ones with drm)

How is it stored on the PRS-T1 exactly, i thought it is a text file rather than a DB. Could you send us an example of this file?

For this, I would ideally be able to underline/highlight and take notes which could then be exported to my pc. Is this possible? I know I can take in book notes, etc. but can they be exported for further use? It would completely smooth my workflow--when I read with regular books, typing them, etc takes so much more time! I see this as the BEST reason for me to go electronic.

You can almost easily do all that. Almost means it's not quite simple.

Exporting notes is both an automatic task and a manual task, especially if you want to save whole paragraphs.

The first oddity comes when you need to highlight paragraphs in order either to save them for future use, or to annotate them right away.
If the text to highlight displays through several screenpages you then have to use a smaller/larger charracter size.
If text you want to quote is real huge, it will then be easier to quote two smaller contiguous excerpts rather than a larger one.

Then you'll need the Reader software to extract and save your notes to your computer. (Calibre does not extract T1 notes yet.)

Automatic extraction is very easy. Open the Reader app, go to the Reader tab, then highlight the book whose notes you want to save, then "copy to library" (injunction may be different, since I use a French version of the Reader app), then open up the book's image, then export your notes (using the proper icon).

The Reader app saves your notes in a nicely formatted RTF file, which is fine. And all the long excerpts are truncated (longer than 100 characters or so), which is much less fine!

Then comes the manual extraction.
Fortunately, you can display all your notes from the adjacent button. What you have to do is:
1) go to each incomplete note,
2) copy the highlighted text, i.e. the very text you had made a note of,
3) paste it in lieu of your truncated note (within in the RTF file).
(You may enjoy a Kafkaian hell of a time trying to copy-and-paste longer notes. Better wear neat glasses.) )

Quote:

I have heard that the Sony software is less than ideal and use calibre on my pc already. I read that using the software forces a "sync" that would drive me nuts! Is this true and would it be necessary to use the Sony software to sync notes?

Just forget the "sync" feature, just do the semi-automatic way I just referred to. And everything else may (i.e. must) be Calibre's lot.

The Reader app is just terrible.

BTW, the Reader for Mac app also forbids you to save several books in a row: each new book saved erases its predecessor (this must be a bug, I guess).

The Reader for PC app reportedly has another bug that may drive you nuts: some users claim it duplicates, triplicates, multiplicates books in the T1 when you transfer them from the Reader app.
(I never encountered such a bug with the Reader for Mac app.)

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how large a highlighted area? character based? unlimited within reason (I'm not talking whole pages here)

Whole paragraphs go almost fine.

Quote:

can you highlight "across the page" in one step?

You can highlight "within the page" easily (see above). Just wait for the first word to be highlighted, then roll the highlight down to the end of your excerpt.

Quote:

can you export them per drag & drop or only with the Sony software or not at all?

No D&G, only the Sony software will do the job right now (hoping I got everything fine).

Quote:

is there another method that makes it more effecient? (just to give another possibility for those who have figured a work-around)

I would love to hear of anything less tedious, that's for sure.

The T1, however, is definitely the best-of-breed eReader when it comes to reading books. The Sony team will have to amend its weird method of
(not-)handling collections, though.

The name always seems to be the same as the marked text. It may be possible to name annotations differently on the device but I haven't tried. This entry is for a single word. If the highlight is long then the name and marked_text fields will contain a truncated version of the full highlight.

I can't provide a copy of my database at the moment, it contains quite a few tables and I'd have to verify none of my work notes are in it. I can't think of a quick and safe way to make a clean database and then restore mine.

The highlight length is hard coded, but easy to fix in a modified Reader app. I will include "unlimited highlight length" in the next version of my modified Reader.

For those who don't want to wait or don't want to use my modified reader (and know their ways around apktool and smali): Commenting out the 8 lines of code after both ".line 2071" and ".line 3033" in BookReadingActivity.smali (v1.0.04.12210) does the trick.[/url]

i'm just too much of a noob to get this running / done. but i'd love to see it done!